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Halloween AND the night before NaNo?

Could it get any worse for people with kids who are participating this year? I think other than December, November has to be the worse month to do this, but here we are.

I have much empathy for you as I live alone, so it doesn’t matter what I do tonight. I can hand out candy or turn the porch light off and pretend I’m not home.

I admit that I ate a lot of the candy last night. I couldn’t help it. That’s why I never buy it because that’s what I do – I eat it.

Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of posting and talk about not being ready for NaNo and I think that’s the whole point of it. It’s not about being ready. It’s all about doing it in spite of it.

This will be my second year and I’ve been ready to start since last week. I am using this time to finish my first draft of a book I started over a year ago. I seem to be able to always find something else to do.

But over the last few weeks, I have put my writing way on top of my list of priorities. After eating, sleeping and working, it comes in at 4th place. Sometimes I nudge it down to 5th when family/friends obligations come up, but not too often.

But maybe someone can answer me this – How DO you get ready to take a month out of your life and rearrange it completely and make writing your priority? How does anyone do that?

I know what I do. I get up early and try to write, but I always seem to forget that I am the WORSE morning person to have ever awakened. I’m not kidding. I’ve never been someone who is wide awake and happy first thing in the morning. In fact, I’ve actually had fights with boyfriends and family over it. I tell them “Look, it takes me awhile to wake-up in the morning, so if you could just cool it for about 1/2 hour, everything will be fine” and then they take this as some type of challenge. Yeah, that’s about the time I start looking at tossing my coffee at them, but I’ve learned to just to smile and not say anything until they stop bouncing around like Tigger on meth.

So, morning doesn’t work well for me. I’m much more creative in the late morning and early afternoon, so most likely I will spend my lunch hour working on my word count. I usually take about 15 minutes for lunch, but even then I can get something done.

I have an evening or two that I can work on it, but there’s a few nights that I can’t. What I ended up doing last year was jamming on the weekends and that requires turning off the phone and unplugging the internet.

What is hard is that the people around me just don’t understand but they know me well enough to realize it is absolutely pointless to try to tell me anything or to get me to do something I don’t want to do. I tell them about NaNo and I get this hesitant smile from them and you can see them mentally scratch their heads and nod. It doesn’t make any sense and why should it?

It’s insane to write 50,000 words a month and I have yet to learn how to turn off my inner editor. I’ll post more on that later, but it is a huge challenge for me and most writers.

Last year I had severe sleep deprivation and I am hoping to avoid that this year, but I honestly don’t see a way around it. I am going to have to force myself to write in the morning and do everything I can to hit my daily word count.

Plus I am trying to finish before Thanksgiving, so my word count will have to be at least 2,173 per day.

So, here we go! Tomorrow is a big day and I would love to know what you do. How do you make the time to do this?

Have you done this before and if so, what happened to your book after Thanksgiving? I am still working on mine. For me, about mid-year of completing it, lots of things went wrong in life and I had to put my writing aside to take care of a family emergency. I found that I lost my momentum and it was very hard to start it back up again.

I hope that by doing NaNo again this year, I will enjoy it and get back into the habit of writing every day and actually finishing the first draft and start my next book.

What are your long-term goals for NaNo? I am dying to hear from other people